Andy returned for the last time to The Mandarin’s body. ‘I loved that cat,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I did.’
‘It just checked out, man,’ said Marvell.
‘Yeah,’ said Andy, breathing in. ‘But Jesus I hate this no-good motherfuckin chickenshit weekend.’ (p. 177)
That provides a marginal degree of redemption for Andy. Celia is the least vividly realized of the Appleseeders, largely because her main function is to be married to the ‘superman’ Quentin Villiers (‘[t]he versatility of the fellow!’ (p. 53)) who is the presiding or at any rate the manipulating genius behind Appleseed Rectory and who
can talk all day to a butcher about the longevity of imported meats, to an air-hostess about safety regulations in the de Gaulle hangars, to an insurance salesman about post-dated transferable policies, to a poet about non-typographical means of distinguishing six-syllable three-lined stanzas and nine-syllabled two-line ones, to an economist about pre-war counter-inflationary theory, to a zoologist about the compensatory eye-movements of the iguana. Just so, he can address a barrow-boy in rhyming slang, a tourist in yokel French, a Sunderlander in Geordie, a Newmarket tout in genteel Cambridgeshire, a gypsy in Romany, (p. 53)
He is, then, a kind of Everyman. But we are warned:
Watch Quentin closely. Everyone else does. Stunned by his good looks, proportionately taken aback by his friendliness and accessibility, flattered by his interest, struck by the intimacy of his manner and lulled by the hypnotic sonority of his voice - it is impossible to meet Quentin without falling a little bit in love. (p. 53)
The two remaining residents are Giles Coldstream - perhaps the one real comic creation in the novel, endearingly neurotic and gin-sodden, obsessed with dentistry - and Keith Whitehead. Little Keith is the Court Dwarf, revoltingly obese, distinguished from the others by a background which might be called ‘ordinarily’ dreadful rather than modishly, affluently dreadful. He suffers and (therefore?) survives.
Even more grotesque are the three Americans - Marvell Buzhardt, Skip Marshall and Roxeanne Smith - who seem to be the forces of destruction, who frighten even Diana and Andy, and who more than frighten Keith. But they are merely catalysts: the real danger, and the source of the novel’s thriller-aspect, lies elsewhere.
The hurtling, obsessive obscenity of Dead Babies… is in the end, as it is intended to be, numbing: that, after all, is part of the satirist’s moral. Yet, like all Amis’s novels, the book has a soft side and strikes unexpected notes of wry gentleness: when the assembled company is ‘a-wheeze with boredom’ after watching ‘unspeakable acts’ (p. 181)
(catalogued nonetheless) performed on film and Marvell promises something ‘“new”’ and ‘“different”’ (p. 182), the treat turns out to be a scene enacted with vintage Hollywood decorum. The point, of course, is that it is infinitely more erotic than the hard-core pornography. The watchers, attuned to a more brutalized world, are confused and astonished. But by now it is too late for redemption - as we have been told, in a passage of sudden dazzling eloquence, a few pages before:
Yes, it was seven o’clock and a pall of thunder hung over the Rectory rose-gardens. The formerly active air was now so weighed down that it seeped like heavy water over the roof. Darkness flowed in the distance, and the dusk raked like a black searchlight across the hills towards them.
But pity the dead babies. Now, before it starts. They couldn’t know what was behind them, nor what was to come. The past? They had none. Like children after a long day’s journey, their lives arranged themselves in a patchwork of vanished mornings, lost afternoons and probable yesterdays, (p. 180)
Those two beautifully balanced paragraphs show Amis’s writing at its best: in their context - they occur abruptly in the harshest section of the book - they are stunningly effective. However, that awkward ‘Yes …’ hints at a narrative weakness: the problem of tone is no more resolved here than it was in The Rachel Papers, and Amis’s attempts at ironic or satirical detachment employing updated Swiftian or Fieldingesque devices, are uneasy.39 □
It is interesting to compare Powell’s positive judgement of the passage on p. 180 of Dead Babies with that of James Diedrick in the extract that follows. Both critics use the term ‘soft’; but for Diedrick it carries a pejorative connotation and is the consequence of a failure of judgement (p. 33). While Diedrick shares Powell’s view that the novel is not a total success as a satire, he explores Amis’s satirical aims and techniques more deeply, linking them with Menippean satire, with the ideas of the twentieth-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and with Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (1762):
■ Dead Babies is Amis’s first and last experiment in formal satire, and it is easy to see why. It exhibits the same verbal inventiveness that characterizes The Rachel Papers, but little of its comic high spirits. In place of the fully realized Charles Highway Amis presents ten minimally rendered characters, most of them suffering from ‘street sadness’ and ‘cancelled sex’ (p. 31), their outward liberation masking inward blight. And they are all forced to serve a satire that is less successful than the satirical comedy of The Rachel Papers. Nastiness proliferates … but the novel is only fitfully funny. Despite these limitations, Dead Babies is full of interest - for readers of Amis as well as students of satire and the novel. It manifests Amis’s ambitious experiments with genre, point of view, and voice as he moves beyond the autobiographical locus of his first novel and toward the wider social concerns of his later work.
… The narrative [of Dead Babies] spans three days, Friday through Sunday. Six English residents of Appleseed Rectory play host to a weekend revel featuring increasing amounts of alcohol, drugs, and thwarted sex. They are joined by a trio of Americans, a young woman from London, and the mysterious ‘Johnny’, who turns out to be a double of one of the other characters. The authorial persona, who appears occasionally to remind the reader of his control over the other eleven, constitutes a shadowy twelfth character. The ‘dead babies’ of the title refers to a variety of humanist beliefs that most members of the group have declared defunct. This phrase is evoked whenever any of these beliefs threaten the narcissistic ethos articulated most aggressively by Marvell Buzhardt. Buzhardt is American, a ‘postgraduate in psychology, anthropology and environment at Columbia University’ (p. 55), and the author of The Mind Lab, which promotes the hedonistic use of psychoactive chemicals. As the weekend proceeds he distributes a variety of these drugs to the Appleseeders, fostering in each an illusory sense of power and control. The increasingly outrageous, ultimately deadly effects of his prescriptions constitute Amis’s judgement on the ethos that produced them.
As Dead Babies opens, the reader learns (p. 14) that Quentin Villiers, the lord of Appleseed estate, has been reading Rameau’s Nephew by Denis Diderot, one of the great Menippean satires of the eighteenth century. Amis is here providing one of many intertextual clues to his own narrative program. Mikhail Bakhtin provides an extended definition of this form of satire in his book Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics, which was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1974, during Amis’s tenure as fiction and poetry editor.40 The most important characteristic of the form, Bakhtin writes, ‘lies in the fact that the most daring and unfettered fantasies … and adventures are internally motivated, justified and illuminated here by a purely ideological and philosophical end - to create extraordinary situations in which to provoke and test a philosophical idea’. The testing of this idea or truth is given priority over ‘the testing of a specific individual or social-typical human character’.41 It is clear from the beginning of Dead Babies that the characters will be subordinated to the ends of satire. After briefly introducing the main English characters, the narrator announces ‘[t]hese are the six that answer to our purposes’ (p. 30). Later, answering the anguished soliloquy of the endlessly victimized Keith Whitehead (‘“who’s doing it all to me, eh?”’), the narrator is even more explicit: ‘you simply had to be that way … merely in order to serve the designs of this particular
fiction’ (p. 162).
Menippean satire is a hybrid form. ‘The organic combination of philosophical dialog, lofty symbolism, fantastic adventure and underworld naturalism is a remarkable characteristic of the menippea’, Bakhtin writes.42 Each of these elements is given play in Dead Babies. Amis stages several dialogues (‘Those conversations’ (pp.135, 155, 165), he calls them) between Marvell and various Appleseed residents that echo those of the two speakers in Rameau’s Nephew. In Diderot’s dialogue, one of the speakers is an unrepentant hedonist and hypocrite who insists his position is the necessary outcome of the materialist philosophy Enlightenment reason is founded on. He is opposed by a speaker who clings to the belief that civic virtue is compatible with materialistic determinism. In Dead Babies, Marvell is the voice of hedonism, and he articulates certain au courant ideas of his generation. It is left to Quentin to oppose Marvell’s posthumanist values, at least rhetorically. He defends love, monogamy, even feudalism, often sounding like an eighteenth-century English squire. He is an anachronism, in other words. Marvell, on the other hand, echoes another representative of the eighteenth century, one who has gained a certain currency in the twentieth: the Marquis de Sade. Sade’s celebration of perversity was not a rejection of Enlightenment values so much as a dark variant of Enlightenment mastery over nature. In a similar sense, Marvell exemplifies one logical outcome of contemporary Enlightenment thinking. He uses Andy Adorno’s embrace of a guerrilla theater group called the Conceptualists, who believe that ‘“Other sex is to do with choice rather than urge”’, to argue that ‘“perversion is justified - no, demanded - by an environment that is now totally man-made, totally without a biology”’ (p. 170). Marvell is a late-twentieth-century embodiment of the same presumptuous and reductive rationalism that satire has traditionally opposed.
Although his assumptions tend to dominate these philosophical dialogues, Marvell’s ‘values’ are implicitly critiqued by a pattern of ‘lofty’ symbolism. Dead Babies is divided into three sections; the list of ‘main characters’ is arranged so as to emphasize two groups of six and three; the action takes place over a three-day weekend; the sexual preference of the Americans is the menage à trois; the neurosis (or psychosis) of each character is traced to the Oedipal triangle. The weekend orgy of sex, drugs, and depravity that constitutes the action of Dead Babies is a kind of infernal parody of the Last Supper, with presiding host Quentin Villiers ultimately revealed [as] the Antichrist (his last name evokes the word ‘villain’ and anagramatically contains the word ‘evil’). There is even a parody of the crucifixion when the long-suffering dwarf Keith Whitehead is roped to the blossoming apple tree in the rectory garden, where ‘two grimed hypodermics hung from his bloated arms’ (p.205). ‘“We’re ecstatic materialists’” (p. 155), crows Andy in a moment of drunken epiphany, but ecstasy is conspicuous only by its absence. In this extreme satire on counter-cultural liberation theology the sacraments of drugs and sex substitute for emotional or spiritual ones, but they never bestow even fleeting grace. For all the compulsive talk of and graphically rendered attempts at sexual congress in the novel, only one couple consummates their desire, and this event leaves the woman in tears.
Body fluids of all kinds flow copiously in Dead Babies, but they are not purgative. They express the varieties of personal and social disease produced by everything from parental neglect to the aestheticization of violence. In Menippean satire, as Bakhtin writes, ‘the idea … has no fear of the underworld or of the filth of life’,43 and Amis, providing proof, rubs the reader’s face in it. The worst tendencies of the present are exaggerated and projected into a postseventies future that has become a theater of cruelty, with the body as its stage. The simulated beating of an aged comedian that the Appleseeders witness at a venue called ‘the Psychologic Revue’ (pp. 100-6), is brutal and shocking, but it is mirrored to varying degrees in the pain and humiliation the characters visit on one another. Keith, described in the character list as ‘court dwarf (p. 11), is fed experimental drugs by Quentin and Andy, who simultaneously delight in and learn from the spectacle of his reactions. Later, in back-to-back scenes of shocking detail, he is sexually assaulted by the three Americans. Physical anxieties and humiliations are commonplace in Dead Babies, from Giles Coldstream’s dental nightmares to Andy’s bouts of impotence, which strike hardest when he meets a woman he can’t dominate. The narrator offers brief but graphic sexual histories for each character, and these, along with their physical eccentricities, tend to define them. In a novel, this formula would seem hopelessly reductive. In a satire on narcissism, it serves to suggest what life has been reduced to.
The satire in Dead Babies is not quite so fixed as this reading has so far suggested, however. It is more than a conservative howl of obscene rage at moral decline (although like all satire it is motivated in part by conservative impulses). It is closer in spirit to the philosophical open-endedness of Rameau’s Nephew than the stable moral ironies of Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) (by titling his satire Dead Babies, Amis is aligning it with Swift’s shocking Proposal, whose speaker calls for the killing and eating of Irish babies). Swift always maintains a clinical distance from the characters and narrators who are the targets of his satire; Amis is to varying degrees complicit with his. This is registered in Dead Babies in varying ways, most noticeably in Amis’s uncertain control of tone at crucial moments. While he strives for and usually maintains a coolly detached point of view, at times his judgement fails him and his writing goes soft. Near the end of the novel, for instance, just before doom descends, the narrator abandons satire for bathos:
But pity the dead babies. Now, before it starts. They couldn’t know what was behind them, nor what was to come. The past? They had none. Like children after a long day’s journey, their lives arranged themselves in a patchwork of vanished mornings, lost afternoons and probable yesterdays. (p. 180)
Verbal triplets are a hallmark of Amis’s style; here they strive for a portentous tone that clashes with the novel’s black comedy.
A more complex manifestation of this open-endedness can be found in the character of Quentin Villiers. Although he mouths the traditional pieties of love, commitment, and paternal responsibility, he actually represents a trap laid for the reader, a false alternative to the excesses of the others. His heart is the darkest of all. He is finally more like de Sade than Marvell himself: a monster of perversion and rapacity. Readers seeking safe harbor with Quentin find themselves alone and unprotected in the final storm. In an important sense Quentin, who combines civility and sadism, deference and control, who has one foot firmly planted in the eighteenth century, symbolizes the historical conditions that gave rise to the Marvells of the contemporary scene … At the end of Dead Babies, having killed his wife, Diana, and Marvell, Quentin sits in the Appleseed Rectory kitchen, waiting for Keith to arrive. He has arranged evidence that will implicate the Conceptualists in all the killings and free him from suspicion. ’ [H] is green eyes flashed into the dawn like wild, dying suns’ (p. 224).44 □
In contrast to Diedrick, David Hawkes sees the final revelations about Quentin not as opening out Dead Babies but as confining it more tightly within a pessimistic perspective upon late twentieth-century humanity that anticipates Amis’s subsequent fiction, in which ‘the demise of the soul will figure alongside the death of love and the degradation of art as the characteristic developments of the postmodern era’.45 With hindsight, it can be seen that the hope expressed by Elaine Feinstein earlier in this chapter (p. 25), that the ‘nightmare … vision’ of Dead Babies would soon become part of Martin Amis’s past, was largely a vain one. None the less, his next novel, Success, would see a slight lifting of the darkness, a move from country-house carnage to the urban struggle for survival in 1970s London.
CHAPTER THREE
Snakes and Ladders: Success (1978)
WITH THE publication of Martin Amis’s third novel, Success, in 1978, his literary reputation began to change. There were the stirrings of an awareness t
hat here was a writer who was starting to create an oeuvre, a distinctive body of work of his own; he was no longer merely the talented son of a famous literary father, even if references back to Kingsley remained irresistible for reviewers. Success offered an opportunity, not only to discuss a new novel by Martin Amis, but also to set that novel in the context of a growing corpus of fiction. This is evident in the review of Success in the Times Literary Supplement by Blake Morrison, author of an important study of the literary ‘Movement’ of the 1950s with which Kingsley Amis had been closely associated.46 In the extract that follows, Morrison compares Success to Amis’s two previous novels, The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies, and judges that, while Success ‘lacks some of the imaginative power of Dead Babies’, it is, none the less, ‘Martin Amis’s most assured work so far’:
■ [Martin Amis] has brought to the fashionable ‘set-pieces’ of the 1960s and 1970s (adolescent sex in The Rachel Papers, drugs and communal living in Dead Babies, and now bisexuality and incest in Success) an old-fashioned Swiftian disgust for the human anatomy. He skirts the genres of romance and soft porn, but derives much pleasure from debunking them, from speaking of what in those genres must always go unspoken (ugliness, dirt, age, excreta, self-disgust). In the latest novel we have a ‘dented backside’, ‘tropical armpits’ (p. 19), breasts which are ‘[g]reat plates of blancmange the size of knapsacks, topped by curlicued sausage stubs’ (p. 90), a man with all his teeth pulled out whose ‘fag-ends sometimes go red and heavy in the slack corner of his mouth’ (p.35).
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 4